SMIL for Business Presentations, 101
For those of us who come from a multimedia CD-ROM development background, the dream has always been to create a high-quality multimedia experience for delivery over the Internet. However, bandwidth and technology limit our ability to create highly synchronized experiences that are as immersive as those offered on CD-ROM. A number of tools that attempt to satisfy this need have been developed over the years, starting with Shockwave and moving toward JavaScript and Flash. But all of these solutions suffer from one problem: They are often difficult to implement. SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) was created to make synchronized multimedia easy.
Back when I was working for the Discovery Channel, we implemented one of the first SMIL presentations for the RealPlayer. During development, we wrestled with whether or not to include video. In the end, we decided that a slide show backed by an audio track would give us the most "bang for the bandwidth." (The site was produced daily for almost two years until November 11, 2000, when Discovery shut it down. You can still see the final production at www.plantronics.com) headset was plugged into the audio input of the test PC’s sound card. GoldWave (www.goldwave.com) software provided the intuitive audio editing interface needed to easily capture our audio to a WAV file, and then edit it for the presentation.The slides used within the presentation are simply GIF files exported from a traditional PowerPoint file (see below for more details).
Figure 1:
<smil>
<head>
<meta name="title" content="Streaming Media Magazine"/>
<meta name="author" content="jrule@ruleweb.com"/>
<meta name="copyright" content="©2001"/>
<layout type="text/smil-basic-layout">
<region id="PixChannel" title="PixChannel" left="0" top="0" width="320" height="240" background-color="#888888" fit="fill" fill="freeze"/>
<region id="TextChannel" title="TextChannel" left="0" top="240" width="320" height="30" background-color="#888888" fit="hidden" fill="freeze"/>
<region id="logo" top="0" left="0" width="320" height="270" fit="hidden" z-index="3"/>
</layout>
</head>
<body>
<par title="multiplexor">
<audio src="audio.rm" begin="0.0s" dur="172.0s" title="Audio"/>
<img src="sm.rp" id="Pix" region="PixChannel" title="Pix"/>
<text src="sm.rt" id="Text" region="TextChannel" title="Text"/>
<img src="end.rp" region="logo" title="logo" begin="170s" fill="freeze">
<anchor href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/" show="new" coords="0,0,320,240"/>
</img></par>
</body></smil>
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